14 September 2019 10:00 AM

A lifetime ago, as a regional business correspondent, I would on occasion try to persuade the news editor that our coverage area, which extended into South Oxfordshire, ought to stretch as far as Cowley, home of the eponymous BL car plant. Usually he’d say no, on the not unreasonable ground that we didn’t sell any papers there, but one morning he relented.

A wildcat strike had crippled production of the company’s new-ish small family car, the Maestro. From memory, the dispute had started in the paint shop. Lots of our readers would work at the one-time Morris factory, I argued.

Given the green light, I rang the union chief at the site. As he answered my questions, I suspected I had been put through by mistake to the Leyland marketing department.

The dispute was sorted out, he said. It had never been significant in the first place. Everyone was behind the Maestro. There followed words to the effect: “BL needs a winner. Britain needs a winner. And we’ve got one.”

I think it was the late journalist Richard West who said he was equally suspicious of socialist millionaires and Tory trade unionists. Unfair, no doubt – my BL man was merely practising what, as Mrs Thatcher’s reign was consolidated, was known in union circles as the “new realism”.

Anyway, all these years later and a very amusing piece by ad-man Paul Burke appeared in The Spectator, reflecting on developments in his trade.

“For about 20 years, the advertising industry has engaged itself in a bizarre charade called ‘Pretending to be left-wing’. Instead of talking about advertising, the pages of Campaign are filled with industry leaders espousing standard-issue, establishment-approved liberal values. And although advertising remains the acme of capitalism, they like to pretend it’s a compassionate, caring, almost anti-capitalist co-operative.”

Too true, old chap, but too limited as well. The fact is that great swathes of capitalist industry are engaged in the same “bizarre charade”.

Read any annual report and find references to “sustainability”, “diversity”, “gender”, “social responsibility” and the rest, scattered like raisins in a cake. Show me an ambitious chief executive who isn’t on the panel of some allegedly-worthy body promoting “green investing”, or “people-focused workspaces” or “more women in business”, and I’ll show you a genuine maverick.

Actually, there is nothing especially left-wing about this pantomime, given the right-on-ness of the modern boardroom rarely extends to such vulgarities as big pay rises for the proles. As Larry Elliott and I wrote in our third book The Gods that Failed (Bodley Head; 2008): “[A]t the 2007 Conservative Party conference, Barclays Bank sponsored an event entitled Absolutely Equal. Given that the £1 million pay packet of Barclays’s chief executive John Varley was something like 40 times the national average, one might have guessed that this absolute equality had nothing to do with money and everything to do with middle class ‘identity issues’. One would have been right.”

Today’s corporate suits are behaving rather like medieval merchants, mumbling the dog Latin of the official religion as proof of their moral decency as they go about their business.

Do they mean it? As with any semi-compulsory ideology, some do and some don’t. Those in the latter category resemble the spivvy businessmen of the old Soviet bloc, as depicted in Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 thriller, and Red Plenty, Francis Spufford’s 2010 series of short stories set at the interstices of economics, politics and consumerism in the USSR, an excellent present from my kids a few years ago.

For such characters, pledging allegiance to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is no big deal, merely a condition of doing business. A bit like getting a market-stall licence from the local council.

As for the true believers, I’d advise investors to beware. I’m pretty sure it was the great City journalist Christopher Fildes who suggested a check-list of “sell” signals for shareholders that included a new company HQ complete with corporate flagpole and fountain in the lobby, and a helicopter landing site for the chief executive’s company chopper.

I’d add any business whose boss and/or other top brass are forever penning guest articles for assorted business pages droning on about “diversity is not some add-on – for us, it is in our DNA”.

Sell the stock now. At whatever price you can get.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

SPEAKING of which, isn’t “in our DNA” one of the most irritating clichés of our time? As is “off limits” (I think they mean “out of bounds”), “call out” (or “pick up on”, as we English speakers say) and “functionalilty”, as in some gadget or other has “great functionality”, i.e. it works.

Meanwhile, it is a fairly firm rule that any Brit whose uses the word “period” instead of “full stop” is a phoney. John Bercow did so this week, as, in days gone by, did Tony Blair. He probably still does.

ON a linguistic theme, my first paper had a blanket ban on the use of the word “gutted”, as in “the house was gutted by fire”. To my teenage self, that seemed a bit harsh, but I now see the point. I’d add the following journalistic clichés to the death list: “boost”, as in “boost to the economy”, “tackle”, as in “tackle obesity” and “crackdown”, as in “tough new crackdown”.

MEANWHILE, should the repulsive and lying Remainers in Parliament (most were elected in 2017 promising to respect Leave) manage to wangle a second referendum, may I offer some advice to any attractive (in all senses of the word) pro-European female politician? In 2003, when Sweden was due to vote in a referendum on whether to join the euro, foreign minister Anna Lindh, a supporter of the single currency, was murdered by a lone madman. In 2016, when campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, MP Jo Cox was murdered by a lone madman. There seems something about Europe-related plebiscites that brings forth lone madmen who want to kill likeable pro-Europe female politicians. Bizarre, huh? So, my advice would echo that of The Angels in My Boyfriend’s Back (1963): “If I were you I’d take a permanent vacation.”

SITTING next to a rolling news channel, I have, as previously mentioned, been soaking up a lot of classical music, listening to Radio 3 through headphones to blot out the ghastly parade of career politicians and their hangers on from “campaign groups”. On Wednesday, as shifty Brexit-hating “shadow Brexit secretary” Kier Starmer appeared on the screen, I basked in Motettorum Liber 7 by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. A vast improvement. But then, so would have been Jack and Jill went up the Hill.

FINALLY, even pro-Leave voices have been mealy-mouthed about the Scottish judges who found against Boris this week. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng was an honourable exception, as was Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail and one or two correspondents on The Daily Telegraph letters page. Is the Edinburgh court biased? Rather like asking if a billiard ball is spherical. In the meantime, can our northern neighbours crack on with their second independence referendum – and get it right this time?

07 September 2019 9:58 AM

SOME things never change, and Britain’s abysmal productivity performance is one of them. On latest figures, covering the first quarter of this year, productivity as measured by output per hour dropped by 0.2 per cent compared with the same quarter in 2018.

Added the Office for National Statistics (ONS): “This was a marginally greater quarter-on-year decrease than the negative 0.1 per cent seen in quarter four 2018.”

Only marginally, eh? Get the flags out.

It went on: “Services recorded labour productivity growth of 0.2 per cent compared with the same quarter in the previous year; in contrast, labour productivity growth fell in manufacturing by 0.9 per cent during the same period.”

That’s a little worrying, considering conventional wisdom has long had it that manufacturing productivity is relatively easy to improve, as know-how and machinery improves, whereas services comprise a much tougher nut to crack. After all, a waiter or hairdresser has only one pair of hands.

Any long-standing readers may recall that I expected a sharp rise in unemployment after the 2015 election, regardless of who won, as the “bloat” in the workforce was reduced. There was, I said, a large number of non-jobs across the private as well as the public sector, some supposedly fulfilling regulatory requirements (compliance, health and safety etc), some imposed by trade unions on weak managements (with special reference to public transport) and some kept in being by a combination of loose monetary policies and low wages – put unkindly, zombie workers in zombie companies.

It didn’t happen, of course. Were I casting round for excuses I’d cite the referendum and David Cameron’s need to keep the (mainly) pro-European trade unions on side, followed by his departure and replacement with Theresa May, who harboured notions of supporting working people rather than turfing them out of work.

Now? I don’t see anything changing, at least not in the short term. We had the “joke jobs” of the New Labour years (diversity outreach co-ordinators and the rest), of whom there are still plenty about, and the “fake jobs” of the current decade. Boris Johnson and his colleagues are on a big spending spree that is bound to bump up the numbers further. For example, how many of those 20,000 new coppers will be “on the beat”, as opposed to patrolling the mean streets of Twitter?

Yet this labour-market bloat gets barely a mention in the official pronouncements. Instead, we have the ONS declaring that: “This sustained period of declining labour productivity represents a continuation of the UK's ‘productivity puzzle’, with productivity since the economic downturn in 2008 growing more slowly than during the long period prior to downturn.”

There is no puzzle. When you see two shop assistants or bar staff serving just one customer, when hospital employees seem too busy carrying files from one part of the building to another to talk to patients, when you hear Tube staff making their pointless announcements in “amusing” (they aren’t) voices to alleviate the boredom of “jobs” that should have been automated decades ago, then you’re looking at the heart of this not-very-puzzling puzzle.

About as mysterious as the astonishing fact that a night on the tiles may well lead to a headache-related experience the next morning.

Saturday bits and pieces

THE Met Office seems a little fretful over the fact that this summer was one of the wettest of the past century, indeed the seventh wettest since records began in 1910. Doubtless the meteorological types are right to be concerned, but I cannot help recalling that, ten or more years ago, drought was the big fear, with the Mayor of London urging us: “Don’t rush to flush if it’s only a pee.” Thanks for that.

Down our way, the local reservoir pretty much ran dry. On July 29 2005, The Independent reported: “There should be water, lots of it; but baked, cracked clay is all there is. The picture on our front page shows how critical the water supply has become after the driest winter and spring in south-east England in nearly 30 years.

“It looks like somewhere in Africa but it is actually the bed of Weir Wood reservoir near East Grinstead in Sussex.”

I know, I know…none of this has any bearing on global/warming/climate change. Nor do a number of quite cold winters this century, including 2012-2013, when it kept snowing into April. Just saying…

RUTH Davidson penned a valedictory column in a predominantly English paper part of which suggested the rule on Contempt of Court must be rather different in Scotland. Either that or the paper in question failed to notice the potential for prejudice of a forthcoming trial. Surely not?

MY recent visit to Ireland coincided with a story in the Limerick Post bringing the gloomy tidings that more than a quarter of pubs in the city and county of Limerick have closed since 2005. There was a lot of talk about drinks taxes but I could see no mention of the smoking ban, which came into force the previous year. Our own prohibition followed in 2007, and in the subsequent ten years 11,000 pubs closed. I don’t know what the score was across the water but I was always convinced that pub closures were an objective of the ban, rather than an unfortunate side-effect. Of course, while the ban was being debated, we were told the opposite by many of our “representatives” (ha, ha), who suggested the pub trade could only benefit from a fresh-air regime. A lie, of course, just like everything they say, from “Smoke-free pubs will attract more families” to “Whatever you decide in the referendum, we will implement it.”

31 August 2019 10:00 AM

DURING the long years of opposition from 1979 to 2007, a favoured phrase among the party’s MPs, for a while, was “On Day One of a Labour Government…” followed by a proposed action.

Well, we’re some way on from Day One of a Boris Johnson Government, and we all know the number-one task facing it (Brexit) but here’s something else that ought to be high on the list.

No, not schools, hospitals or even hiring more coppers, but shutting down HM Treasury.

OK, so “shutting down” is putting it a bit strongly. Breaking it up is rather more what I have in mind.

Why? A couple of reasons.

One, it is unhealthy to have such a dominant department pulling the strings for just about everyone else in Whitehall. Read any Budget speech from the past 20-plus years and see Chancellors announcing, inter a lot of alia, road improvement schemes, programmes to hire more schoolteachers of a certain type, tax breaks for cartoon-makers, sweeping welfare changes and local government reforms in key conurbations.

Don’t even start on “our NHS”.

As I’ve said before, we could save a lot of money by transforming the secretaries of state for education, health, transport and the rest into junior Treasury Ministers responsible for each area once covered by their former departments. But that would exacerbate, not solve, the problem of this huge cuckoo in the Whitehall nest.

Two, the Treasury is wrong about everything. In 1976, it forecast doom for the pound without spending cuts. A year later, a strong pound had become a headache for exporters.

It embraced money-supply targets, which didn’t work. Then it wanted Britain to join the European Exchange-Rate Mechanism, which was a disaster.

Come the New Labour years, and it enthused about the “end of boom and bust”, claiming that rapidly accelerating public spending actually represented caution. And it cheerfully kept moving the “economic cycle” about the calendar to “prove” that spending was in balance.

Three, the Treasury’s egregious role before and after the 2016 European Union referendum would on its own qualify the department for the breaker’s yard. The fons et origo of both Project Fear and the more recent attempts to sabotage no-deal preparations thus undermining Britain’s negotiating position, this is an outfit whose time has gone.

So, to recall a question put to me when I worked in a particularly top-heavy newsroom and occasionally suggested eliminating one or other management post, what would you put in its place? Back then, I’d have said “Nothing”, that being the whole point of the exercise.

That’s not really an option this time round, so here is one possible answer. First, shrink the Treasury to the size and role of a more conventional Ministry of Finance. The Chancellor would remain responsible for fiscal policy, raising the money the Government needs and managing the public finances.

Decisions on how the money is spent would be arrived at collectively, in Cabinet, as used to be the case.

All other functions would be merged with the Business Department to create a new Economics Ministry, responsible for industrial and trade policy, grants and subsidies, management of public stakes in various businesses and for nationalised industries such as the Post Office. Critically, neither the Ministry of Finance nor the Economics Ministry would have any regulatory powers. These would be vested in a third ministry which would oversee the whole range of business regulation, from weights and measures and trading standards to the Financial Conduct Authority, the Competition and Markets Authority and other bodies.

The chances of a Treasury dismemberment may be higher than we think. After all, in 2007 the Home Office saw its responsibilities for prisons and probation hived off and combined with the Lord Chancellor’s Department to create the Ministry of Justice.

It is still called the Home Office, and its boss remains a holder of one of the great offices of state, but it is really now just a Ministry of the Interior. Similarly, our new Ministry of Finance could still call itself the Treasury and the Chancellor would still be a big figure, but the “imperial Treasury” would be no more.

It cannot happen too soon.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

EXCELLENT news on the front page of The Times on Tuesday, when we were told research showed: “Red wine is healthy for gut and figure.” Hurray! True, the paper felt obliged to quote a member of the Health Blob to cast doubt on this, but it’s a start. Alas, it turned out that the benefits could be obtained by drinking one glass every two weeks. Only one drink a fortnight? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?

I was in Ireland over the bank holiday weekend and have to report my Ryanair services flew without a hitch, despite the pilots’ strike this side of the Irish Sea. Home again Tuesday morning, I clicked on Radio 4 to see if Today had changed in my brief absence and landed straight into an item about “transgender foster care”. So no, nothing had changed. I clicked off.

PET hates, as you know, include 24-hour television “news” (it mostly isn’t) and pointless railway announcements. A key irritant in the former category is the ludicrously portentous music that precedes each half-hourly bulletin, as if the telly hacks were themselves masterminding the supposedly-momentous events they are describing. The latter appear, on Southern at least, to be expanding further. In addition to the existing witter about minding the gap and taking all your personal [sic] possessions with you is a new type of infuriatingly-sibilant female-voice advising us to carry a bottle of water in hot weather and to stay on the platform if you feel a bit dicky so that we can “feel better together”. Nauseating, eh?

ON a happier note, just when you decided the BBC had reached peak unbearability, you come across this item on its website, headed: “’Mushroom foraging saved me from my grief’.” A moving story.

TO end where we began, there is more to the Treasury even than its current bloated Ministerial form. That is merely what is properly known as “departmental Treasury”. Sitting on top of this is a superstructure headed by the First Lord of the Treasury, one B. Johnson (the Chancellor is Second Lord), and a number of Junior Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, posts usually filled, rather prosaically, by Government whips. Many years ago, the then government had no-one to send to the inauguration of the new leader of a not-terribly-important country. Then a brainwave – send a whip, using his official title. On arrival, the whip in question was a little surprised to find a band and honour guard had turned out to greet this most distinguished of guests, the British Lord Commissioner.

24 August 2019 10:00 AM

CROWDS massed in Times Square and grown men wept openly in the street as the news broke: the US Business Roundtable, citadel of red-blooded capitalism, had fallen. The hugely influential group issued on August 19 a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.

Out went shareholder value as the over-riding objective. Alongside it, in came the needs of assorted stakeholders: employees, local communities, suppliers, the environment.

Cynics suggested Corporate America was trying to pre-empt actual legally-enforceable stakeholder obligations likely to be imposed by Democratic legislators giving vent to the fury of their supporters over stagnant earnings and soaring executive pay. Larry Elliott in The Guardian gave a nod towards such suspicions on Monday.

Personally, I am not sure the cynics are being quite cynical enough. More on that in a moment.

First, let’s look at the round-table statement in the context of three decades of talk about “corporate governance”. For those who joined the debate in the Nineties, it may have seemed that the notion of curbing the excesses of the profit-motivated corporation arose from the alleged need to control headstrong bosses such as Robert Maxwell, Alan Bond and John Gunn, in other words to protect shareholders from the executives who nominally worked for them.

In fact, the original idea started from quite the other way around. After a wave of takeovers in the mid to late Eighties, in which sitting managements had fought in vain to maintain the independence of their companies, it became conventional wisdom that shareholders were far too keen to take the money and run and ought to be reminded of their responsibilities. British directors looked enviously to France, where boards considered their shareholders to be punters rather than owners.

After the collapse of a number of companies in the squeeze of the early Nineties, the focus shifted to protecting shareholders from the abovementioned “alpha tycoons”. Already, one may have thought that a concept that could be spun round 180 degrees may not be overly intellectually rigorous, but few did.

Onward to our present century, and the corporate governance empire spread wider still and wider, its commands enforced by the Stock Exchange (which took it upon itself to insist that listed companies comply with its nostrums or explain why not) and by the regulator of financial accounts.

No longer confined to such mundanities as “splitting the roles” (it being a central tenet of corporate governance that the chair and chief executive ought to be different people) corporate governance extended its tentacles into matters such as the number of women on company boards.

Other than in those early years, when shareholders were the target rather than executives, it has long been assumed that every extension of corporate governance is unwelcome in the boardroom, whose occupants resent any dilution of the core capitalist principle that companies exist to deliver profits to those who own them. Is that true?

Put it this way, in which of the following scenarios is the executive more accountable, one in which profit is the yardstick or one in which they are expected to deliver on a range of fuzzy metrics? The latter provides considerably more hiding places than the first.

If one measure of success falls down, just point to a measure that is doing rather better. We seem to have come full circle, with corporate governance ending as it began, as a mechanism to shield directors from shareholders.

Saturday bits and pieces

DOUBTFUL about the possible axing of HS2? Just look at who’s in favour: the Liberal Democrats, the “metro mayors” who preside over a newly-invented and useless top tier of local government and the Confederation of British Industry, who this week urged Ministers: “Back it, build it, benefit from it.” Do you need any more convincing, especially as the real “benefit” is for the CBI’s members in the civil engineering industry, doubtless salivating at the thought of a £60 billion-plus welfare cheque.

MEANWHILE, more Brexit fearmongering, this time from those posh medical trade unions with names that suggest they are disinterested guardians of “our NHS”. According to the jumped-up pill pushers (sorry, “Royal Colleges”), no-deal would be a disaster. Looks, chums, can’t you stick to drawing up your next juicy pay claim?

ON the subject of the Health Blob, The Daily Telegraph, which used to display a perky streak of Tory anarchism, mined a load of data from an NHS survey on young people’s health to produce that favourite story of The Blobbies, a page lead declaring: “Middle-class parents to blame for children who drink alcohol.” The usual suspects had been contacted, including the repulsive Public Health England, but the real cause of shame for the Teetolgraph came in the fact that even the BBC didn’t report the story in this way. Instead, Auntie told it straight, covering results for cigarettes, drugs and, yes, alcohol. This didn't stop the paper from running solipsistic feature articles about the evils of drink on each of the following two days. How very sad.

I first suspected that rolling TV news is not all it’s cracked up to be a long time ago, during the 1991 Gulf War. Stuck in The Guardian newsroom on the night US forces went into Saudi Arabia prior to liberating Kuwait, a key issue was what had happened to the price of oil. CNN, then the pre-eminent 24-hour news channel, had nothing to say on the subject, preferring endless two-way conversations between the anchor and the reporter on the spot along the lines of: ”What is your take on this, Bob [or whoever]?” Our office librarian dug out an old transistor radio, we tuned into the World Service and our question was answered.

All these years later, I sit next to a (different) rolling news service, and can’t help thinking little (other than the business news) has improved. It mostly comprises not news at all, but attitudinising by under-employed "campaigners" and verbal diarrhoea from career politicians. And the items go on and on, regardless of value, presumably in a desperate attempt to fill the abundant quantity of airtime. To take just one example, a channel devoted a good half-hour on Thursday to discussing with a senior bod from Channel 4 why she had made a speech calling Boris Johnson a liar.

But there are compensations beyond that Boris now has an excellent excuse to privatise the country's most pointless nationalised industry. (Just how many State-owned broadcasters do we need?) On Wednesday, I was able to blot it all out by discreetly listening to Radio 3 over headphones. Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, then Ernest Bloch's Prayer (From Jewish Life)? Can’t be all bad.

17 August 2019 10:00 AM

ONE clear lesson from the appalling saga of official vindictiveness and incompetence seen in the persecution of innocent people by the police on the word of the paedophile fantasist Carl Beech is that, in modern Britain, there are just two categories of people.

Those you would entrust with your life.

And everyone else.

The personnel of Britain’s public authorities are very much in the second category. They are not on your side and are best avoided unless there is no alternative.

Classic liberals have been proved to be spot on – the State is an interest group in its own right, neither the mystical source of authority beloved of High Tories nor the all-wise friend of the people hallucinated into existence by socialists. All State decisions ought to be questioned and nothing State functionaries say should be believed without corroboration, from “alcohol guidelines” to the “green-ness” of diesel cars, from “weapons of mass destruction” to Project Fear.

In economic and social terms, this translates into what is known as a “community of trust” as opposed to a “community of law”. Confusingly, it is in the latter that public authorities and legislators are sufficiently trusted for people and businesses to outsource their judgments to them.

In such a community, economic actors are happy to do business with people they have never met and may never meet, confident in security of contract. Courts are trusted to reach fair and impartial rulings. People can be reasonably open in both their business and private lives (“transparent”, in contemporary parlance) given the State has, within very broad limits, no interest in personal motives or opinions.

Most commercial and a fair bit of private life is out in the open, not because everyone is a transparency nut but because there is simply no need for it to be otherwise.

Communities of trust – the sort of community into which we are rapidly transforming – are very different. Business is conducted with people you know – not with whom you are acquainted, but really know. This keeps commercial activity within very tight circles of trusted parties.

No-one wants to go to court, given the legal system is viewed as staffed by State operatives with a habit of reaching capricious judgments that baffle and enrage ordinary people. For that reason, very little is written down. E-mail is for the transmission of bog-standard, routine information, nothing important or sensitive.

An employee is a potential time-bomb, capable of blowing a hole in the finances of your business with lawsuits, demands for “flexible working” or extended “parental leave” and all the rest. So, firms will increasingly rely on “gig” workers, and will actually employ only those, again, whom they know and trust, possibly family members.

Both on and off duty, circumspection will be the order of the day in everything from cracking jokes to expressing personal opinions, which will take place only within a close circle of family and friends, lest a member of our tragically-understaffed police force (see above) turn up on the doorstep talking in a threatening way about “hate speech”.

What will be the economic upshot? Almost certainly, slower growth, for a start. Rapid economic expansion is predicated on the existence of what are known as multilateral relationships: law-based, anonymous business linkages across sometimes immense distances, giving each economic actor a wide choice of potential corporate partners. A community of trust will, by contrast, be marked by bilateral business relationships, as economic actors restrict their dealings to those they know and trust.

Beyond that, there may be benefits in terms of keeping economic activity within local communities and more closely aligning management and ownership, given shareholders – another potent source of costly legal action – should be selected as carefully as employees. Public listings are already experiencing a decline in popularity, which is unsurprising given the fondness of stock-market authorities for lecturing businesses on “corporate governance”, i.e. whatever are the fashionable nostrums of the moment. This trend will continue.

But for the businesses concerned, the one unalloyed benefit of a community of trust will be quite simply to keep the State at bay.

Getting off on it

IF the State is an interest group, what are its interests? One is surely the expansion of its own authority. This week alone, we have heard of plans to ban the following: all mobile phone use in cars, grouse shooting, and the sale of beef in at least one university college canteen “to tackle climate change” (oh yeah?). OK, this last wasn’t a direct State initiative, but a faculty directive supported by the not-so-rebellious students, but it is of a piece with State activity.

Another piece of freelance banning popped up this week from the misnamed Advertising Standards Authority (it has no authority and no legal powers) in its bans on adverts found guilty of promoting “harmful gender stereotypes”. Kate Andrews from the Institute of Economic Affairs was very good on this in City AM, here, although she was far to polite about these repulsive people.

This suggests to me that two developments are called for. One is the rehabilitation of stereotypes, or “archetypes” as they are more properly called. From the ancient Greeks to Carl Jung it has been thought that a stock of character types in the collective mythos is beneficial because it allows everyone, from the humblest to the highest, to identify with the timeless figure that best resembles them.

The second is that we need a new media/entertainment group that will simply refuse to pay any attention to the control freaks at the Advertising Standards Authority or any other collection of self-appointed tossers. We no more require a regulator for advertising or journalism than for historians or novelists.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

I sit next to a 24-hours news channel, thus hear a lot of classical music, because I discreetly play Radio 3 through headphones to blot out the ghastly parade of career politicians mouthing away on the screen. On Thursday, I learned that Igor Stravinsky composed a chamber concerto in honour of the Bliss family’s Washington estate, Dumbarton Oaks, famously used to host the 1944 conference that led to the creation of the United Nations. Fascinating stuff and great music. It had been the sight of Jo Swinson, leader of the “Liberal” “Democrats” hoving into shot that had me scurrying for the Third Programme. I’m almost grateful. Almost.

ELSEWHERE, a fine piece here by Julie Bindell on “transgenderism”. I like the sound of the Ray Blanchard chap whom she references.

A fortnight back, I mentioned that I was reading The Temptation of Forgiveness (Heinemann; 2018) by Donna Leon, creator of Venetian detective Commissario Brunetti. At one point, Brunetti is speaking to his bosses’ secretary:

“’ You know people don’t like to get involved with us.’ For a moment she looked beyond him, as though checking something written on the wall, and added: ‘Not just us, the State in any way.’ She went on, her voice tentative, as though she had to speak this through before she’d understand what she wanted to say. ‘The contract’s been broken between us and the State, or been dissolved, but no-one wants to make the news public. We know there’s no contract anymore, and they know we know.’”

10 August 2019 10:00 AM

YOU have to wonder whether the powers that be actually want anyone to move house - ever. The staggering level of bureaucracy and expense is an enormous deterrent and creates a powerful incentive to stay put.

As you may have gathered, I’m going through this process at the moment and am astonished at how much has changed since the last time, the summer of 2004. Back then, and throughout my past property ownership, dating back to 1982, the stress of moving (second only to divorce, they used to say) was generated by two factors.

One was the potential unreliability of both those to whom you were selling (who may well drop out) and those from whom you were buying (who may gazump you, demanding a higher price at the last minute). So prevalent did this latter practice become during the boom of the late Eighties that, from memory, one estate agent routed its telephone calls via Scotland, where, in contrast to England and Wales, a verbal agreement is binding.

Whether this had the desirable effect of deterring the gazumpers is not recorded.

The other source of aggravation was the huge bore of having to pack up your possessions and arrange for removals.

And that was it. Your solicitor would take care of all the legal bits and pieces and your surveyor was paid to ensure that the place you were buying wasn’t falling down. The same was true for those purchasing your old home.

No more. Today, the biggest source of stress is the British State, with endless forms having to be filled in and assorted bits of paper produced. I imagine lawyers love it but no-one else does.

The principle of caveat emptor has been tossed aside and sellers practically have to prove to potential buyers that there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, wrong with the property, or the gardens, or the neighbours. Or anything else that may impinge on the happiness of the buyers.

All of which is rather odd, given that, for several decades, we have been told social mobility in the geographical as well as the class sense is vital for economic success. In a fast-changing world, people need to be able to move to where the jobs are. Bike-wise, get on yours.

More recently, policy has attempted to rebalance the economy away from the south-east and towards the “northern powerhouse”. We had better hope that all the right people with the right skills are not only available in the North Country but that they live within easy commuting distance of their potential employers.

Talking of commuting, I would suggest that we are seeing and will increasingly see tortuous journeys to work as people move jobs but don’t change homes. Great for the environment. eh?

I am not sure how we ended up in this position. Labour introduced a time-consuming and expensive “home information pack” that sellers would have to draw up before they could put their home on the market, but this was axed by the Coalition, although one aspect – the energy performance certificate – survived.

By a roundabout way, we seem to have resurrected the concept without anything much by way of debate. Real estate translates, in Italian, as “immobiliare”. That sounds about where we are.

First, think of the answer...

I have just completed an on-line survey for East Grinstead Town Council (for those uninitiated in the mysteries of English local government, this is the urban equivalent of a parish council) on cycling and walking. My key objection to the wording of this exercise is that “cycling and walking” were frequently bracketed together, when the fact is that those of us who walk round the town are frequently menaced by cyclists riding on the pavement, running red lights and the rest of it. I suspect the answers to which we were being funnelled by the shape of the survey would suggest the town urgently requires more “facilities” for cyclists. It doesn’t.

Saturday bits and pieces

SOUTHERN Railway has taken to flagging up trains on its platform indicator boards as “arrived” even when they may be a minute away from the station. Delays of 15 minutes or more entitle passengers to compensation, so we can assume the “arrived” claim is logged in the company’s records, it being incredible that Southern would maintain a parallel punctuality-recording system that more accurately reflected the actual arrival of trains. When turning down compensation claims, every little helps, presumably.

ON the subject of Southern’s announcement boards, I really could have done without exhortations of the “Happy Pride” variety in recent weeks. Virtue signalling by profiteering corporate suits is never attractive. And before you ask, I would have taken exactly the same view had Southern been plugging an event in which I am interested, such as the carpet of flowers at Arundel on Corpus Christi. Just try running a decent train service, will you?

TAKING a second look at freeports, about which I wrote last week, I think the whole concept needs to be expanded beyond tariffs, taxes and trade. If these zones are to be truly extra-territorial, could we not widen the concept of “free” to spare them assorted legal burdens that apply in the UK proper, whether the drug laws or prohibitions on “hate speech”. A virtuous circle could take effect in which the freeports, as well as being hives of commercial activity, would develop also as cultural hubs, home to free spirits from the world of the arts as well as from the business sphere. Tangier, ho!

TO end where we began, is not the torment facing house vendors part of a wider phobia arising from the notion that no purchasing decision should ever cause regret, that buyer’s remorse must be no more? This began in the financial world in the late Eighties and beyond, when the idea took root that were an investment to be unsuccessful then it must, by definition, have been “mis-sold”. I fear I may have played a very small part in this when covering financial regulation for The Guardian. If so, I’m paying for it now.

03 August 2019 10:30 AM

WE are to have ten new freeports, it seems, as part of the “turbocharging” of the economy. I was once told that turbocharging involved (I think this is right) recycling the exhaust fumes back through the engine to give it a bit of a kick.

Anyway, we’ve had freeports in the past, on and off, since the Thatcher years. My favourite freeport story from those years involves a very distinguished firm of accountants finalising, on behalf of a client company, plans for a factory sited in such a location.

These plans would then be submitted to the appropriate authorities who, in the normal run of things, would then grant approval. The client firm would then be in business, enjoying all the tax advantages on offer.

Only at the last minute did one of the accountants spot that, because of an error, the border between the freeport and the outside world actually ran straight through the proposed facility. Worse, the factory itself was on the wrong side of the line, and only the staff carpark would have been in the freeport.

True, it would have been the most tax-efficient staff carpark in the country, but that wasn’t really the idea.

By now, you may have picked up the essential notion of freeports, which is that goods and raw materials can be shipped in tariff-free, that factories within the port area can turn these imports into value-added products and said products can be exported, again without paying any tax. Details vary from one freeport to the other (there are more than 3,000 around the world) but this is the basic gist.

To supporters, they are hubs of dynamism, enclaves of the buccaneering can-do spirit. In an ideal world, some think, the whole country would be one big freeport, of which more in a moment.

To critics, they represent, in the words of Labour’s international trade spokesman Barry Gardiner, “a race to the bottom that will have money-launderers and tax dodgers rubbing their hands with glee”.

Rather than take sides, let’s just ask a few questions, in a genuinely forensic spirit.

To what extent do freeports simply move existing businesses from “real world” to “free world” without creating any new economic activity? That’s clearly a risk, but a counter-argument would be that a business model that would not work “onshore”, for tax and other reasons, could be made to work in a freeport. Furthermore, given employment protection legislation, how easy would it be to shut an operation “onshore” and pop up in a freeport with an identical business?

Is the key objective simply to get trade humming or are the freeports also supposed to be regenerating depressed areas? This hasn’t always been clear in the past, with a blurred distinction between freeports, their weaker relations the enterprise zones and special development areas (memorably described in Yes, Minister as “marginal constituencies”). It would make sense to enforce a rigid distinction here.

If the conditions of doing business in a freeport are so obviously fantastic, why not extend them to the whole country? No longer would there be a boundary between “onshore” UK and the freeports – we would all be on the same side of the line, factories, carparks and all. Presumably the loss of all our tariff revenue would be a huge blow to the Exchequer, but that then raises the question of whether to put some sort of upper limit on freeport activity.

Assuming freeports remain distinct from the rest of the country, there will obviously need to be fairly rigorous policing of the borders between UK proper and the freeports, to prevent goods leaking from “offshore world” to “real world”. If, as Eamonn Butler wrote in The Daily Telegraph yesterday, the key to making freeports a success is to “treat them as a foreign territory” (which sounds about right) then these home-grown foreign countries need to be kept separate from “onshore Britain”. We would need also specialist police to work inside the freeports skilled in detecting the kinds of crimes specific to such zones.

Beyond the tariff-free regime for goods coming in and leaving the freeports, what other tax incentives will there be? VAT and Corporation Tax could be waived, but much beyond that and you are heading towards hand-out territory. Indeed, outside the European Union, there would be nothing to stop a British Government lavishing grants on freeport recruits. Applying the same principle as in (2), this should be resisted. Apart from anything else, it is absurd to hail firms in freeports as dynamos of enterprise and then claim they need welfare cheques to survive.

So, there are a few suggested questions. Looming over them all, however, is the key one: what will “success” look like? More jobs, more exports, more growth – all three? I suspect this definition remains a work in progress.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

READING her diary in this week’s edition of The Spectator, I was starting to feel sorry for Penny Mordaunt, sacked by Boris Johnson as Defence Secretary. She stood her teams at the MoD a drink or two to say thank you. Then, we learn: “The following day, I do the same with my other department, the Government Equalities Office.” My other department? Defence is a great office of State, in my view; by contrast, the Government Equalities Office is one of those very contemporary British quangos that manages to be simultaneously pointless and sinister. Check out the website, stuffed full of the modern version of dog Latin with which the State religion “communicates” its rubbishy ideas while daring anyone to object.

MEANWHILE, Sky News ran a lengthy item earlier this week about climate change, a tiny bit one sided, I fear. Inevitably it included an interview with that bratty Swedish schoolgirl before whom the political class abases itself. I can remember when, 30 years ago, Sky went on air and the chattering classes were convinced that Rupert Murdoch would use his news channel to pump out continuous right-wing propaganda. How long ago that seems now.

HELLO August, a lovely month (especially in Sussex) and in some ways my favourite of the 12.

FINALLY, I am again reading the excellent Donna Leon, creator of Venetian detective Commissario Brunetti, this time appearing in The Temptation of Forgiveness (Heinemann; 2018). At one point, Brunetti is in a café, reading a newspaper: “He closed it, wondering how it was that every issue could contain at least eight pages with headlines that blared news of profound schisms and new formations that would completely change the face of national politics at the same time as nothing changed and nothing happened.”

27 July 2019 10:00 AM

MAGIC bullets. I’ve been thinking a lot about them recently, in the context of supposedly sure-fire solutions to Britain’s post-war economic malaise. While France, Italy and West Germany experienced their famous “miracles”, Britain did not. From the late Fifties onwards, the search was on for a home-grown version of Asterix’s magic potion, a one-time, once-for-all fix for all our problems.

How many have there been? That depends, really, on how you define them. I’d suggest there have been two main solutions proposed and two subsidiary ones, variations on the themes.

First off was technology, which pre-dated Harold Wilson’s “white heat” thereof but which was most strongly associated with his first spell in office from 1964 to 1970. Derided by the Daily Mail on his resignation in 1976 as a technological revolution that meant the telephone boxes worked less well than they used to, the “technology fix” had its successes, from the world’s first nuclear power station at Calder Hall (later Windscale, later still Sellafield), the Harrier jump jet and the world’s fastest diesel trains.

The failures tended to arise from putting techies in charge, resulting in over-expensive, over-engineered and under-market tested products such as the Advanced Passenger Train, the System X telephone switching system and, famously, Concorde.

Critically, none of this white-heatery proved to have the transformational effect on the British economy sought by policymakers. By the late Sixties and early Seventies, the technology fix was being supplemented by the first of our subsidiary “solutions”, the “institutional fix”.

This took its most visible form in Britain’s accession to the European Community in 1973, but was manifested also in huge bureaucratic reorganisations in local government, the National Health Service and Whitehall and in the first proposals for devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales.

The social contract among government, unions and business that dominated the second half of the Seventies does not really count as a magic bullet, being more a sort of running repair to try to stop the economy collapsing under what were surging waves of inflation and unemployment. Nobody thought it would lead to an economic miracle.

Our next big “solution”, of course, is Thatcherism, an umbrella term for a suite of policies the key ones of which were a drive against inflation that took little account of the implications for employment, a series of legal changes to bring the trade unions to heel and the pursuit of wholesale market-based solutions, whether privatisation, the contracting out of services or the creation of notional “internal markets” in the public sector under which commissioning units would behave like commercial purchasers, no longer automatically favouring their in-house colleagues in the awarding of tenders.

By 1990, Mrs Thatcher’s last year in office, it was clear some of the claims made for Thatcherism in the late Eighties were somewhat overdone. Inflation was rising again, growth rates compared poorly with those of the supposed years of failure pre-1979, public services appeared run down and European economies were once again showing Britain a clean pair of heels.

Enter our second subsidiary solution, New Labour, sort-of Thatcherism with a human face, keeping the essentials of the market consensus but softening the edges with a minimum wage, more public spending and a lot of vaguely positive atmospherics about Europe, social tolerance and “equality” (of the identitarian variety, of course, nothing to do with money).

August 9 2007, the date of the credit crunch, pretty much did for Thatcherism and New Labour, for now, at least. So what’s the next magic bullet?

Well, we had to get there at some point, so could it be Brexit? We have heard a lot from Boris Johnson about the golden future that awaits us outside the European Union. Is this the next disappointment?

I have no idea. But I do know that (as a Brexit supporter) I have always focused on the constitutional issues. I urged people to do so in late 2016, when a load of guff was being talked about a “rise in hate crime” and, even-handedly, I urge them to do so now, as our new Prime Minister goes on a Hope Speech spree.

Saturday bits and pieces

BORIS, alias Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, joins that little club of modern Prime Ministers who don’t use their first name, along with James Gordon Brown, Leonard James Callaghan and James Harold Wilson. In a slightly different category was the man born Alexander Douglas-Home, Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964. On his father’s death he became the 14th Earl of Home, then renounced his peerage to become Sir Alec Douglas-Home then went back to the Lords as a life peer, Lord Home of the Hirsel. Do you think he ever had trouble remembering his current name? Actually, his successor bar one as Tory leader and PM was no slouch in terms of collecting titles. In reverse order, they are Baroness Kesteven, also known as Lady Thatcher, before that Lady Thatcher (not as a peer but as the wife of a baronet) and before that, of course, as Mrs T.

THOSE of us who would like to see the illiberal and undemocratic Liberal Democrats disappear and be replaced by a proper liberal party as opposed to a ghastly collection of ban-happy, anti-Brexit tossers, were on an each-way winner with the final two leadership candidates, Sir Ed Davey and Jo Swinson, but I think, by a nose, the victory of the latter is the better news for us. Sir Ed could always have talked up his Cabinet experience (Energy Secretary 2010-2015), while the election of his opponent reflects the continued delusion of the English chattering classes that their compatriots rather like Scottish career politicians, especially the female of the species (think Nicola Sturgeon). They’re so wrong.

HOW predictable that the useless Southern/Thameslink railway “services” used the heat wave as an excuse for being even more utterly crap than usual, with huge numbers of cancellations announced by its army of supernumeraries in silly fluorescent bibs. New Transport Secretary Grant Shapps should treat these franchise holders the way Boris treated his unlamented predecessor, Chris Grayling.

FAREWELL to The Archers. Sorry, but a joke's a joke. Just as you thought nothing could be more boring than the arrangements for Jim's birthday than we had Peggy's offer of prize money for environmentally-worthy schemes. Then came Jim's remembering of child abuse, followed, at the end of each episode, by a man with a sludgy voice (i.e. a modern-day Radio 4 presenter) telling any listeners "affected by these issues" that "advice and support", i.e. snooping and interference in your private life, is available.

FINALLY, the Anne Milton years draw to a close. Who will ever forget where they were when they heard that this giant of modern politics, a Minister at the Department for “Education”, had resigned, citing her horror of a Boris premiership? Truly, we shall never see her like again. Whoever she was.

20 July 2019 10:30 AM

THERESA May is ending nearly a decade near or at the top of government as one would expect – by banning things.

The worst Prime Minister since Edward Heath, at the very least, has presided over a flurry of proposed bans in recent days, every single one of them pointless, bossy and unpleasant.

In no particular order, we had, in The Times on Thursday: “Young drivers will be banned from the road at night under Government plans to cut accident rates.” As with all motoring-related prohibitions, this is difficult to argue with given that the less activity on the roads, the lower the accident rate.

A complete ban on driving would result in zero motoring-related deaths, while a curfew applied to the entire population would similarly reduce fatalities, even when the countervailing rise in domestic murders resulting from people being cooped up is taken into account.

The unfortunate fact is that “saving lives” cannot be the sole criterion for judging illiberal policies.

Then there was the ban on selling scratch cards to anyone under the age of 18 and, courtesy of the Daily Mail on Wednesday, the news that: “Under 16s are going to be banned from buying energy drinks in a tough new crackdown, according to reports.”

When not banning things, Theresa May has been plotting to waste our money on a quango called the Office for Tackling Injustices. Don’t we already have an equally-pointless Government Equalities Office?

Furthermore, aren’t many injustices harder to untangle than may have been thought? I am pretty sure that it was Denis Skinner MP – apologies if I have got this wrong - who acknowledged this with the example of a wealthy tenant in dispute with a much less well-to-do landlady.

Mr Skinner could see the complexities but added that he would side with the tenant, because of what he called the “class interest”.

Is “Offinj” or whatever it will be called going to take the same approach?

On day one of a Boris government, our new Prime Minister should drop the whole lot in the wastepaper basket. Will he? Well, given his first act as Mayor of London was to ban drinking on the Tube, the auguries aren’t particularly good.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

THIS had me doubled up, reported in The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday:

“The Armed Forces have unacceptable levels of sexism, racism and bullying because they are led by a "pack of white middle-aged men", a report says…The report, by Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston, the new Chief of the Air Staff, describes the leadership of the RAF, Army and Navy as a ‘generation not used to having people from other diversity groups serving alongside them’ and says their behaviours are ‘shaped by an Armed Forces of 20 years ago’.”

Twenty years ago, eh? Wasn’t that when we used actually to win military campaigns (Sierre Leone, Kosovo and, before then, the Gulf War and the Falklands)? As opposed, of course, to being defeated (Afghanistan, Iraq) or simply achieving next to nothing (Libya, Syria).

But then, 20 years ago, the forces still fostered a martial spirit in which recruits didn’t tend to burst into tears, get pregnant or have sex-change operations.

MEANWHILE, Melinda Gates, wife of super-geek Bill Gates, was subject to a treacly interview in the Telegraph on Wednesday, under the paper’s “women mean business” logo. Which is odd, because Mrs Gates has never been in business. We were told she was “a computer science graduate who began her career at Microsoft before moving into philanthropy”, this latter career involving going around the world giving away hubby’s money. She is passionate about equality, apparently, but presumably this is not the financial variety. Alas, the interviewer did not get around to the key question: “What first attracted you to multi-billionaire Bill Gates?”

SO, Christine Lagarde has had payback from her time at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), when she quite improperly involved that institution in the Greek bailout (the IMF ought not to be lending to developed economies in the European Union – the other EU states should be doing that). Now she is going to be in charge of the European Central Bank. Nice one.

EVERYONE else has their Moon landing story. This is mine. My father had worked as a librarian at a further education college before moving on to greater things. For old time’s sake, he and my mother were invited to a faculty party to watch the landing on television. My siblings and I were babysat by a very practically-minded Lincolnshire woman, who was concerned not about Armstrong and Aldrin, but Michael Collins, who was up in the command module. “I feel so sorry for that chap,” she declared. Why, I asked, because he won’t be going on the Moon? Oh no. “If anything happens to the two down there, there’ll be nothing he can do to help.”

True, of course. In case the news passed you by, I am happy to report that all returned safely.

13 July 2019 10:28 AM

AN article in Private Eye about the regulation of the betting industry had me thinking about the way things used to be.

Today, politicians and bureaucrats wrestle with controls on advertising by bookies, not least during the televised sporting events on which bets can be placed. But not so long ago, if memory serves, bookies were not allowed to advertise at all.

Furthermore, their high-street outlets were practically indistinguishable from porn bookshops, with frosted glass and/or blacked out windows. Their minimal signage would often describe the business as a “turf accountant”.

My future wife and I fell about laughing as recently as 1993 when, visiting Limerick, we came across a cheerful-looking betting shop named The Lucky Punter. No way would that have been allowed in the UK.

Casinos most definitely could not advertise and were not allowed even to call themselves casinos – the approved term was “club”.

Elsewhere, pubs shut in the afternoon and closed at 11pm (sometimes 10.30pm, depending on local magistrates) and, on Sunday, were open for a grand total of five hours (noon to 2pm, 7pm to 10pm).

Solicitors were not allowed to advertise, nor were doctors, dentists or – wait for it – opticians. This last group was apparently required also to trade under sober-sounding names (e.g. Dollond & Aitchison), and when, in the mid-Eighties, a firm appeared called Spectacle Express, it seemed rather racy.

These restrictions made up a patchwork quilt, some being enshrined in law, some being locally determined, some comprising self-denying ordinances by professional bodies. The point is that sweeping them away means that, when problems appear, there seems no alternative to “tough new legislation” inevitably introduced by some grinning-idiot “Minister”.

That’s progress. I don’t think.

Saturday bits and pieces

LAST week, I drew attention to my rear-view review on the Lion & Unicorn site of John le Carre’s masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, suggesting, not entirely seriously, that one character, Oliver Lacon of the Cabinet Office, was clearly a Soviet agent, given the various obstacles he had placed in the way of MI6 sleuth George Smiley. An old friend (no stranger to the secret world in a previous life) demurred. Lacon, says friend, is probably just another bumbling backside-covering Sir Humphrey, not half as clever as he thinks he is.

Anyway, the point of the book and the subsequent television adaptation, in 1979, is that MI6 has been conned into thinking it has hooked a big Soviet double agent, whereas in fact this agent (“Merlin”) is spying on the British. As 1979 saw also the unmasking of the “fourth man” in the Cambridge spy scandal, many, me included, were left for years with the impression that our secret services were gullible and useless.

Imagine my surprise on learning that, from 1974 to his escape in 1985, we had a real-life, solid-gold agent inside the KGB, Oleg Gordiesvky, one of the best spies, perhaps the best, for any western secret service. Still with us, I’m pleased to say.

So, children, Father Christmas may not exist, but Merlin does.

MEANWHILE, in the leopard-not-changing-his-spots category, The Times on Tuesday contained just the sort of right-on material – an article about “dad shaming” (whatever that is), an account of actor Aidan Turner emoting about the pain of “objectified” women, a photo of a presumably-“empowered” female boxer – that shows how far it has come since its days as an establishment newsletter.

Or maybe not. Reacting to the Sir Kim Darroch affair, three letters to the editor said, in effect, that Darroch was a sound chap and a good man. On the leader page, the first item said much the same thing, going on to detect a “danger…to the quality of British governance”. Assorted presumedly anti-Brexit senior officials and the judiciary have come under attack from Brexiteers and, well, it’s a jolly poor show, according to the Thunderer, because these are irreproachable Top People.

How reassuring to see the paper’s old, establishment instincts never went away. Psst: the reason these eminent personages have come under attack is because they have been so obviously pro-Remain.

STAYING with the paper, a week ago, Matthew Parris wrote: “I fought in Parliament against seatbelt compulsion. I harried Ministers over their compulsory ‘video nasties’ classification system. I helped draw the teeth of legislation to criminalise men who kerb-crawled for prostitutes. Later (as a journalist). I was sceptical about Tony Blair's minimum wage legislation and its encroachment on freedom of contract. I was opposed to the smoking ban, and prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco advertising. And I was pretty hostile to the sugar tax.”

He added: “I now think I was wrong, every time.”

No, old son. Absent the minimum wage, you were right first time.

HAVE you noticed how much longer it takes to pay for a drink in this exciting new digital age compared with the days of old-fashioned cash tills and lightning mental arithmetic by bar staff? Next time count the number of times the barman/barmaid has to tap a screen before you can settle up.

FINALLY, that great run of post-Easter feasts that enliven the late spring and early summer – Ascension, Whitsun, Trinity, Corpus Christ and St Peter’s and St Paul’s day – is over. Today is marked in my Church diary simply as: “Our Lady on Saturday.” Charmingly modest, I think.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press